


A Jerk By Any Other Name

by x_los



Category: Blake's 7
Genre: Fluff, M/M, Pet Names, Season/Series 01
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-29
Updated: 2015-12-29
Packaged: 2018-05-10 05:07:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,033
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5572159
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/x_los/pseuds/x_los
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An exhausted Blake says something he really shouldn't have.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Jerk By Any Other Name

**Author's Note:**

> Beta'd by Aralias (who also gave me a title).
> 
> (for a kink meme prompt) (…that I made myself) (shame is something that happens to other people) (look no one ELSE filled it)

Blake would have blamed sheer exhaustion, if he had been the sort of person who blamed circumstances (especially ones he'd helped to create) for moments of personal weakness. He wasn’t. If Blake's body or will betrayed him, if he made a decision he was unhappy with or regretted, Blake typically laid the blame squarely at his own doorstep—and then tripped on it whenever he needed to go in or out of the room, as a sort of penance. Things he'd have excused in others he ruefully resented in himself. Even when circumstances were so ranged against him that, rationally, he knew it'd be ridiculous to hold himself accountable for their effects.

It was ridiculous now. They had been pursued for twenty-three hours straight, a whole armada after them (and what the Federation ships had lacked in speed they'd made up for in numbers and tenacity), calling up the line for backup as they went. The whole crew had been on high alert for that entire period. And then, once they’d finally managed to slip free of the noose, there had still been a need for someone to take the watch. Since they were all equally exhausted, Blake had said he'd do it. Meanwhile, someone _else_ had to bully the auto-repair circuits into attending to the strain of the long, high-speed push, because Zen’s repair priorities weren’t necessarily theirs. And _that_ could only be Avon.

The ship seemed tomb-silent tonight, as though the bone-deep exhaustion of its occupants had seeped into her semi-organic walls. Perhaps it had. They didn't know much, really, about how the ship worked, and the internal sensors had given Blake food for thought in the past. At any rate, the over-taxed engine was quiescent now, and Zen itself seemed to be ‘napping’, lights blinking in a slow rhythm like the visible rise and fall of a sleeping man's torso. Avon would have chided Blake for that bit of anthropomorphization, if Blake had said as much—but then Avon would have chided _Blake_ for breathing just now. Had, in fact, already done so.

Avon's civility, always a shallow pool, had been drained to the dregs by the stress and the hours without sleep. Avon was now having not just to remain awake and watch a screen with a measure of focus, as Blake was, but to do a tricky bit of electronic-coaxing while ready to drop. He seemed to be keeping himself together and functional by maintaining a low boil of anger, and Blake could hardly begrudge him that—even if it was factually incorrect, and unfair, to blame Blake for either the totally unexpected presence of the fleet or for that fleet's over-zealous dedication to its duty.

"Did _you_ touch this last?" Avon asked as he examined some wiring, and Blake understood from Avon's tone that he certainly wasn't about to be congratulated on the fine work he'd done.

"Yes," Blake said, attempting to curtail Avon by keeping it relatively civil and curt—perhaps a mistake, when Avon was evidently spoiling to bicker. Besides, who the hell else would it have been? Jenna, in her own, unapologetic words, didn't do tech-grunt-work, and only the three of them knew a damn thing, in any capacity, about how a space ship worked.

"Were you trying to repair this, or weave something?"

It wasn't Avon's best joke. Blake tiredly considered pointing out to Avon that jacquard loom weaving had, in many senses, been the first computer programming, so if he had been it might have been an appropriate approach, but he was too bleary to frame it right, and so he just rubbed his head in his hands and muttered,

"Weave something, probably. Need a jumper?"

He personally believed Avon went for such buttoned-up outfits and thick fabrics because he felt the cold: a theory which contested for popularity with Vila's suggestion that Avon was a lizard creature who walked among them and preferred not to reveal the scales that covered his body, as this would give the game away. Really it was only the crew's fondness for Blake (Avon himself exempted) that kept the general vote from being a landslide in Vila's favor. Not that the others disliked Avon, per se—they got on with him well enough, they just also thought he might be a reptile plotting the downfall of man.

Avon did not respond to the offer. After a minute's silence, he smacked the panel shut and said, not for the first or even the second time,

"If you hadn't _insisted_ on going through that planetary sector—"

"I didn't insist," Blake said calmly, slumping down over the console he was watching and blinking hard to refocus. Still nothing on the monitor. The scan completed its sweep cycle, finding nothing out on the furthest perimeter of its range, and started again from the center. Safe for another ten minutes. Nothing could come up fast enough to be a danger to them in that time frame, if it wasn't showing up already. Blake liked the steady pattern of the search algorithm, which rippled out, as from something dropped into water. Unfortunately, the regular pulsing of the blue circles was also soporific. Watching it, Blake kept almost nodding off and having to jerk himself back.

Avon didn't stomp over to his next task, but he did make rather a production of moving in a way that indicated he resented having limbs, having to operate them, and having to do so in this particular venue worst of all. Annoyed as Blake was, he smiled slightly at this outsize, cat-like indignation, but he schooled his face to a neutral expression before Avon could catch him at it.

"Why the hell were we even there?" Avon said, to Blake rather than to himself.

Blake gave a deep sigh, his control having slipped out from under him. In the past, he’d found that Avon could be surprisingly humane, if you asked him for his gentleness. Blake avoided doing it often because he wasn't sure whether Avon counted asking that particular favor, wanting or needing it, as a weakness—whether he despised what he had to treat delicately, whether this brought them closer or pushed them apart. But he would take the risk, now, because it was that or _strangle_ Avon, who then wouldn’t be able to complete the necessary repairs, or off himself and leave the others without a watchman.

"I can tell you _again_ that we were en route to pick up supplies, and that it was an accident and no one's fault, but I doubt you'll listen to that rendition either. Love, I'm exhausted, and I know you're no better, but if you could _please_ try and keep it together for just a _few_ more hours, you can finish, Jenna can take over the watch, and we can both get some sleep. All right?"

Blake finished rubbing his face with his hands and looked up to find Avon frozen fixedly in place, looking at him with wariness and shock. Blake frowned. "What?"

"What did you call me," Avon said, low and slightly too fast, sounding not much like a question.

"I'm sorry? 'Avon'?"

"No," Avon said decidedly, taking a step closer to him, expression tightly guarded. "No, you said—"

Blake ran his words back over in his mind. Felt himself blanching, his expression twisting, as he remembered exactly what had popped out of his mouth—and quickly fixed his face in a blank configuration. It bloody figured—Avon needed to be told why they’d been in this sector _three times_ , but _this_ , he caught just fine.

"Nothing—perhaps you misheard?" Blake suggested.

"I didn't," Avon said flatly.

"A slip of the tongue," Blake said, because it had been. He hadn't meant to _say_ it. Just—to think it.

He often thought it. It was implied, sometimes, in the very structure of his sentences—he could feel its omission, the little four-letter lacunae where he didn't call Avon that because he didn't call Avon a damn thing but Avon. Out loud. And he certainly hadn't intended to say it—well, ever, actually, but especially not casually, on a rotten day, with exhaustion and exasperation in his voice, as though they'd been married decades and were having some mundane disagreement, but could rely on something beyond and beneath it, as certainly as you knew the ground was under you when you walked down the street.

But he'd gone and done it. Maybe he could pass it off as being Northern (he wasn't). Delta (he wasn't). Camp (only when roaringly drunk—generally, he wasn't).

"That is not,” Avon pointed out, “quite the sort of thing one says out of the blue."

Avon's face could be so legible, at times—a moment ago Blake felt he could have anatomized every scintilla of his irritation—but now it was as stark as a classical statue. One of those discus throwers, looking over their shoulder with nothing but a blank anticipation. Poised. Waiting for something undefined.

Fair enough. It wasn't, really, the sort of thing one said out of the blue, no.

"Just forget it," Blake said tightly.

"Why should I?" Avon snapped back. "What did you mean by that?"

"A momentary lapse," Blake said, regarding him evenly now. _Give me a break for once,_ Blake prayed, strangling the word that would have naturally capped the sentence even in his mind.

"'Lapse' implies a kind of continuity. Is that how you think of me, Blake?"

It was on the tip of Blake's tongue to be petty. 'Is _what_ how I think of you?' and all that nonsense. But Blake recognized the petulant stupidity of it and refrained. He glowered and didn't say anything.

He wasn't stupid. He knew that it was just him in this. They worked together as long as their interests aligned, but only he wanted to be doing this (or if not wanted, felt it was necessary), and only he believed in it, and only he wanted to be here doing this _with Avon._

He had actually thought 'but of course it's just me, and hopeless besides' a moment before he'd known he was in love. He was grateful for that, because he'd never been hurt by false hope, never had to desperately wonder if he could negotiate a casual fuck or push their friendship into something closer. Always knowing where anything like that would go, how unreceptive and uninterested Avon would be, had kept his wishes and expectations reasonable and circumspect. Blake only had time and energy for one massive losing battle at the moment, and the revolution had the prior claim on him.

When Avon did something lovely, for him or just generally, it made the part of Blake that thought overthrowing the government that dominated the galaxy possible and imperative, that almost automatically calculated odds and strategies, difficult to ignore. But Blake always let those seeds of potential action drop down below the surface. He enjoyed the ripples they left in him as they went with a kind of melancholy pleasure.

Because Avon was a good man, but didn't want to be. He didn't care about the things Blake cared about, he'd never shown much willingness to open himself up to Blake, even on the friendly level the others had done. Strangely Blake _felt_ closest to Avon while knowing less about him than he did about the others—while being less obviously his friend. But he knew _that_ was all on his side, as well. Afer all, Avon had nearly, quite pragmatically, left Blake on Cygnus Alpha, and while Blake didn't _blame_ him, he did think—Well, there's your answer, then. And look at how they argued. Besides, there was also some lingering hurt in Avon’s past, which he sometimes indicated had sealed the whole subject of romance off, for him. If there had been nothing else, this alone might have sunk all prospects. Then there were the occasional evidences of contempt, which Blake didn't like to think about, both because doing so hurt (and he couldn't indicate that, couldn't show himself susceptible) and because it didn't seem fair, in a way, to hold them against Avon's better humors. Or useful. A long memory often wasn't—fortunately for him.

"Forget it," he advised Avon again—because they needed to keep working together, until their interests no longer aligned to Avon's satisfaction, and because it was the strategy he himself found best.

"I don't think I will," Avon said. Blake wondered if it was a threat and wanted to roll his eyes, but couldn’t quite summon the energy.

But Blake's expression, his only-slightly-raised eyebrows, must have done the job, because Avon clarified of his own accord.

"I don't particularly want to," Avon amended himself. "Interestingly, it's not how I think of you."

Blake opened his mouth to say he wasn't really in the right frame of mind to receive whatever choice epitaphs Avon might be about to share, but Avon got in first.

"Mine is rather more maudlin—yours has the benefit of being direct. Succinct. Perhaps I'll adopt it."

Avon spoke somewhat matter-of-factly, as though Blake had just explained why he preferred Earl Grey with milk, actually, contrary to common practice. But Blake suddenly noticed that Avon _wasn't_ actually statue-blank. He'd been put in mind of statues because Avon was so pale right now, even for him. But while Zen's fascia maintained its steady, sleep-breathing rhythm, Avon's chest was rising faster, his breathing shorter and more shallow than usual. His tone was a lie, then. What else was?

"You think," Blake said quite slowly, wanting to make sure he had this right, "I'm dangerously naive, possibly insane, fundamentally wrong in most of my beliefs, and couldn't think my way out of a paper bag."

Avon blinked at him. "Not—underlyingly. I was quite angry with you, when I said what of that I actually said. Justifiably, I might add. You're often dangerous, but you're not naive, per se. I'd only just met you, and we were careening between starvation and sedative drugs—I wasn't feeling particularly generous. You are certainly sane—which makes how wrongheaded your decisions can be all the more irritating. You're rarely wrong in your beliefs—and _that_ is even more irritating. Mostly you're mistaken in how you choose to execute those beliefs—not always, but our survival thus far has mostly been a matter of luck, which we cannot rely on forever. And you thought your way off the London—let's call it one and a half times. It presented considerably more of a challenge than a bag, so I expect you could probably get out of that too.”

Blake glanced at the detector, buying a moment to steady himself. It made another pass back from the vacant rim of the field to the center.

"It is how I think of you, yes," Blake said, answering a much earlier question. “I do. Love you,” he clarified, bluntly, because he wasn't going to be a coward about this. He'd not stayed silent out of cowardice in the first place, and he wasn't going to let it sway him now, when it seemed that the reasons he had been silent might have been based on a few false premises.

"That's good," Avon said quickly, and Blake raised an eyebrow at the complacency of it.

"Shut up," Avon said, "I'm _very_ tired."

"I’ll feel the same in the morning, you know. If you finish up, you can get some sleep," Blake told him, feeling strangely almost guilty—his accidental declaration had kept Avon from his task, and the man was barely standing as it was.

Avon looked surprised for a moment, then understood. "No, I finished—about forty minutes ago, now."

So Avon had stayed to needle him and pace and prod the equipment in a pantomime of industry, after the danger had passed, to keep Blake company.

 _Oh, go on then_ , Blake told the part of him that assessed odds and strategies, which was starting to become considerably interested in how best to secure things far too far in advance of what they were discussing at the moment, from specific sex acts to a mutually agreeable retirement residence when the time came.

"I find it rather comforting, after we've been through something, to have you around," he told Avon.

Avon nodded immediately. "It is, after all, proof that you're fine. That I am fine."

"It's calming."

"Exactly."

Blake crossed his arms over his chest. "I thought you valued empirical proofs, and yet you're all the way over there."

Avon grinned at him, sleepy and sloping. "Whose fault is that?"

With an elaborate sigh and another glance at the (clear) detector, Blake walked over to Avon and, with a wry look shared between them, tried the business of pulling Avon into an embrace.

He'd thought it would be more of a delicate negotiation than it turned out to be—they were sleep-soft and pliant, and wanted it rather a lot. Avon closed his eyes, seeming as though he'd fall asleep just where he was, and murmured something into the shoulder of Blake's jacket.

"What was that?" Blake asked, trying to catch at least the number of syllables in whatever it was Avon had just called him.

" _Nothing_ ," Avon said.

"Mm. Planning on ever telling me?"

"Not really, no."

"You don't think you'll ever say it, oh, for example, in bed, then?"

Avon hesitated. "I don't plan on ever telling you _outside_ a bedroom."

Blake granted his plans department this scrap of additional jurisdiction. "We'll see about that. Get to _bed._ I'll manage here alone. A little over an hour and I'm relieved."

"God no, I need at least ten hours’ rest before we can—" Avon blinked. Realized that wasn't what Blake had meant. Realized then that Blake was rounding 'an hour and forty minutes' down to 'a little over an hour'. "Ludicrously optimistic as usual."

"Oh, so that one you _do_ mean." Blake smiled into Avon's hair.

Avon slipped back. "Good _night_ , Blake."

"See you in eleven hours," Blake deadpanned at his retreating back, and Avon fell into bed with a grin on his face, and slept the sleep of the Relatively Just.


End file.
